15 January-Arrivederci, Saigon – FREE screening

All screening are followed by an informal Q&A session with the documentary director

All of them, bar one, were under age, they were going to be big on the international scene as an all girls band before the expression Grll Power was even invented, they were The STARS. When their manager proposed “the tour of the century” how could they turn it down? But it was 1968 and the “tour of the century” unexpectedly took The Stars from the industrial hinterland of Livorno,the steelworks of Piombino and the Piaggio factories in Pontedera, not to the glamour of the Far East, as they had been promised, but to the battlegrounds of a war-torn Vietnam. Fifty years later, The Stars tell the story of their unexpected adventures amongst American soldiers, remote jungle bases, falling bombs and soul music.

The film will be in Italian with English subtitles.

duration 80 minutes

Directed by Wilma Labate

Director of Photography Daniele Ciprì

The result of a precious collaboration between UCL and FilmItalia, ITALIA DOC is a showcase of contemporary Italian documentaries (in Italian with English subtitles), curated by Dr. Cristina Massaccesi, Senior Teaching Fellow and Italian Language Coordinator at University College London.

Each screening will be followed by a Q&A with the documentary’s director.

Entrance is FREE, but booking is mandatory.

All the screenings will take place at UCL’s Bloomsbury Studio at 7pm (doors open at 6.30pm).

Wednesday 12 December 2018 from 19:00

L’ORA D’ACQUA / A BREATH OF WATER

Mauro is a professional diver who works at great depths below oil platforms, in the middle of the sea. He must live in a small hyperbaric chamber for most of the year. In his spare time, he likes to teach his little friend Milo how to dive. When Milo helps Mauro accept the reality of how bored he is with life on the platforms, Mauro tries to realize his childhood dream: salvaging sunken ships. Over everything looms large the tragic silhouette of the Costa Concordia cruise ship where 32 people died when it was wrecked off the coast of Isola del Giglio in Italy on 13 January 2012 due to a collision with a submerged rock; the ship capsized hours later and was subsequently declared a total loss.

Synopsis: In the mid-1960s, Emanuela’s family hosted some refugees who had fled from Eastern Europe and were living in a refugee camp in Latina, 70 km south of Rome. In her house, there are still many photos and letters from that time and Emanuela decides to start looking for those people. What has become of their lives, and what they remember of that period of transition from the East to the West? After many years they make a painful journey into their past, remembering the pursuit of freedom, coming back to the refugee camp, meeting the people who worked there and finding many documents in the archives: photographs, cards, numbers and letters.

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When you learn a language it’s good to have different tools – learning a language using songs, videos and films is relaxing and fun, and can help you to enjoy the learning activity. You’ll find that you can memorise the exercise much more quickly than with a written grammar exercise.
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